Tag Archives: Benjamin Hancock

HOW can we know the dancer from the dance, asked W.B. Yeats. It’s a question embedded in Sue Healey’s absorbing On View: Live Portraits, a piece that incorporates the moving image, live performance and, for 10 minutes at the beginning, the dancer as museum object.

When the doors to Bay 20 at Carriageworks are opened the audience, free to wander at will, discovers five dancers placed separately around the dimly lit space. They perform some dance actions but there’s a remote quality about the movement. It’s as if the performers need to wrap themselves in an invisible protective shield.

The audience is then seated for the main event, a 60-minute dance work that invites one to contemplate character, personality, differences between the mediums of film and live performance in creating portraiture and to assess the combination. Or, to be honest, you can skip the theorising and just luxuriate in the company of Martin del Amo, Shona Erskine, Benjamin Hancock, Raghav Handa and Nalina Wait, in the flesh and up on five large screens, your enjoyment doubled. (The piece has been seen in a different version, with these performers, in Melbourne at Dance Massive, as On View: Quintet.)

Healey knows how to pick a dancer. These are wonderfully mature, individual artists. As we see on screen and in life, Wait is a strong and voluptuous mover with a highly expressive face; Erskine is elegant and enigmatic; you will likely never really know what del Amo is thinking but whatever it is, he intrigues; Handa is sensuous and full of juice; and Hancock is fabulously other-worldly, exotic and surprising. Or are these performances not to be confused with intrinsic nature? The dance or the dancer?

The screen imagery is arresting and gorgeously captured – Judd Overton is director of photography – and may be seen at various art galleries around Australia later this year and next. There is, however, nothing to match the presence of the performers. Each makes an impression as an individual but Healey doesn’t leave it there. At the end the five come together, dressed alike and moving as one in a gently ecstatic whirl. The affirmation of community is extremely beautiful.

On View: Live Portraits would be welcome at any time but is particularly good programming at Carriageworks right now. It sits brilliantly alongside 24 Frames per Second, the wonderful large-scale exhibition devoted to dance and the moving image (which I wrote about here). But while 24 Frames per Second runs until early August, On View has a run of just a week. It deserves more.

WITH a bit of Einstein on the Beach over here, a spot of 2001: A Space Odyssey over there, a suggestion of wonky 1950s sci-fi film, images of sleek robotics and a sliver or two of domestic life, Keep Everything is both an eclectic treasure trove of references and utterly and beguilingly itself.

With only three performers and a set consisting of bits and bobs of rubbish there’s a hand-made quality to Keep Everything entirely in keeping with the original impulse of choreographer Antony Hamilton: to take dance ideas he’d previously discarded and see where they went. Where they went was somewhere much more intriguing than you might expect from airing a few ideas that didn’t made the cut.

Keep Everything is nothing less than a breathless (literally at many points) race through human history from the primordial swamp to a mechanistic future and back again. It may have a deceptively grungy air but is, in fact, incredibly virtuosic, highly expressive and tightly organised.

Often working with complex rhythms or durations that must be calibrated precisely to the micro-second the dancers – Benjamin Hancock, Lauren Langlois and Alisdair Macindoe – seamlessly evolve sounds and movements from primitive to futuristic via the quotidian stuff of everyday life: getting the dog to come in, having sex, giving birth, that sort of thing. The phrase “keep everything” takes on a multiplicity of meanings: Hamilton’s use of material; the junk strewn around that speaks of our over-stuffed material society; the need to hang on to other people; the desire to gather experiences and sensations; the need to keep making a noise, whether grunting, conversing, screaming or spewing strings of numbers. (The last sees Langlois and Macindoe in tremendous form – the Einstein moment.)

All this – and there’s a lot packed into a fast-flowing hour – happens to a whiz-bang sound design from Julian Hamilton and Kim Moyes (The Presets), Benjamin Cisterne’s exceptional lighting design and Robin Fox’s AV design. There’s a lot of serious talent on board.

Best of all, Keep Everything is effortlessly witty. Not always something you can count on in contemporary dance. I’m sure I heard Langlois whisper “this isn’t working” at one point, and I hope I did. It was funny because obviously everything was going like a rocket, and funny because it was like a little ghost bobbing up from a time when Hamilton was choreographing and decided not to use this scrap of an idea.

The moment passed quickly and I accept I may have been mistaken. I may have misheard. But I’ll take Hamilton’s advice and, you know, keep everything.